[tcard]

> why Catalonia wants to separate from Spain?

I won't actually answer the question (it's complex, and others have done so already). I just want to make sure people understand that we don't really know what "Catalonia" wants because no real referendum has taken place.

Catalonia is a heterogeneous society that has attracted lots of immigration from poorer regions of Spain over the last decades, and claiming that "Catalans" want independence without doubt can only be done by adopting a dangerously ethnocentric meaning of "Catalan".

If you look at regional elections, separatist parties have consistently achieved less than 50% of the votes, even when posed as "plesbicitary" [1] on the issue. They've only managed to form governments because, as it's often the case, the electoral system over-represents rural areas.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Catalan_regional_election